The Desk Set Donates Books to Needy New Orleans School

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Debra Lau Whelan -- School Library Journal, 1/10/2008 2:00:00 PM

The gift-giving season isn’t over for the kids at A. P. Tureaud Elementary in New Orleans. The school, damaged by Hurricane Katrina in 2005, received more than 450 books today, thanks to Maria Falgoust, co-founder of the Desk Set, a New York-based social group for librarians and library students.

"The kids were very grateful, and when they saw the books their eyes lit up and they started browing through them immediately," says Bill Falgoust, Maria's father.

Born and raised in New Orleans, Falgoust was inspired by her parents, Bill and Donna, who still live in the city, and decided in mid-December to reach out to the school, which only reopened in January 2007 after being flooded.

Located in the 7th Ward, an area devastated by the 2005 hurricanes, A. P. Tureaud is across the street from still-vacant homes and a burned-out church just a few doors down. “Like many neighborhoods throughout the city, the neighborhood is still obviously struggling,” says Falgoust, who posted a message on the Desk Set mailing list, as well as several online library school bulletin boards, urging colleagues and friends to purchase books for the school from a wish list she created on Amazon.com 

It didn’t take long for the word to spread—and in no time, people from as far away as Vancouver, British Columbia, Vermont, California, and Michigan started buying items on the list. The list, put together by teachers at A. P. Tureaud, consists mostly of multicultural books such as I Love My Hair! (Little, Brown 2001) by Natasha Anastasia Tarpley and illustrated by E. B. Lewis; The Skin I’m in (Jump at the Sun, 1999) by Sharon Flake; and Black and White (Houghton, 1990) by David Macaulay. 

The response was “so big and generous that I had to add a bunch of similar books to the wish-list so we could have enough for people to purchase,” says Falgoust, a librarian at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn, NY, where one parent donated more than $300 worth of Barnes & Noble gift cards. And rather than buy Christmas presents this year, Falgoust’s colleague at Saint Ann’s, Sarah Mente, and her family decided to donate books in each other's names.

Until this morning, piles of books were sitting on Bill and Donna Falgoust’s kitchen table awaiting delivery. “My parents’ mail carrier was a bit annoyed to be hauling so many boxes,” Falgoust laughs.

This isn’t the first time that the Desk Set—named after the 1957 romantic comedy starring Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy—has done a good deed. The group, made up of hipster New York librarians, publishers, and archivists in their 20s and 30s, has held book drives for Books Through Bars, which sends books to prisoners all over the country. And Falgoust personally organized a huge benefit for New Orleans—complete with a raffle, T-shirts, and a dinner at Enid’s, a restaurant in Brooklyn where she waitresses part-time. The proceeds raised $8,000 for the nonprofit aid groups Habitat for Humanity and Common Ground in New Orleans.

“A lot of people don’t realize that the city still needs a lot of help,” says Falgoust. “By sending the books, it not only might turn some kids on to reading, but it might let the teachers know that people want them to succeed—and that they care about them and haven’t forgotten them.”

The Desk Set, co-founded with fellow librarian Sarah Murphy, has more than 200 members.